Some men spend their whole lives standing at the edge of things.
Ryan Fraser is fifty-seven, almost divorced for the second time, and an expert at the art of almost. Almost committed. Almost stayed. Almost loved someone the way they deserved.
Now he has retreated to Port Darling with no plan beyond silence and the hope that stillness might finally feel like enough. It doesn't. Because his neighbour is Fiona. Thirty-four years old, sharp, warm, and the kind of presence that makes a man question every exit he ever took. So what does he do? Well, Ryan does what he always does best. He stalls. He waits. He almost.
But before he can decide what he's willing to risk, the past arrives in the form of Fiona's mother. Susan. The woman Ryan abandoned in Warsaw thirty-five years ago. The one he has never stopped measuring every other choice against. Her return forces a question Ryan has no way to escape: is Fiona the daughter he walked away from before she existed?
Tender, devastating, and told with uncommon honesty about the cost of a life lived at a careful distance from its own heart, this is a novel for anyone who has ever chosen the easier thing and wondered, for years afterward, what the harder thing might have become.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Ryan Fraser is fifty-seven, almost divorced for the second time, and an expert at the art of almost. Almost committed. Almost stayed. Almost loved someone the way they deserved.
Now he has retreated to Port Darling with no plan beyond silence and the hope that stillness might finally feel like enough. It doesn't. Because his neighbour is Fiona. Thirty-four years old, sharp, warm, and the kind of presence that makes a man question every exit he ever took. So what does he do? Well, Ryan does what he always does best. He stalls. He waits. He almost.
But before he can decide what he's willing to risk, the past arrives in the form of Fiona's mother. Susan. The woman Ryan abandoned in Warsaw thirty-five years ago. The one he has never stopped measuring every other choice against. Her return forces a question Ryan has no way to escape: is Fiona the daughter he walked away from before she existed?
Tender, devastating, and told with uncommon honesty about the cost of a life lived at a careful distance from its own heart, this is a novel for anyone who has ever chosen the easier thing and wondered, for years afterward, what the harder thing might have become.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Used availability for Mitchell Lanigan's The Cost of Almost